Equipment inventory confirms 34 carts for a roster of 31 active players, a ratio one coach calls ‘objectively a little absurd’
A major league organization’s spring training complex has confirmed, through an internal equipment inventory obtained by this publication, that the facility currently maintains thirty-four functional golf carts for a spring roster of only thirty-one active players, a ratio facilities director Hank Okonkwo-Reyes acknowledges is “objectively a little absurd when you actually say the numbers out loud.”
Okonkwo-Reyes explained the cart accumulation happened gradually over several years, with each department, including coaching staff, medical personnel, media relations, and even the facility’s landscaping crew, acquiring what he called “just one more cart, for just one more specific purpose,” until the total quietly exceeded the number of actual players the carts were nominally intended to transport between practice fields.
A veteran player, speaking candidly about the cart surplus, said the abundance has become something of a running joke throughout the clubhouse each spring. “You genuinely never have to walk anywhere here,” he said. “Between the outfield and the clubhouse is maybe two hundred feet. There is still, somehow, always a cart available for that trip, which feels excessive even by the generous standards of professional athlete convenience.”
The facility’s cart fleet includes several specialized vehicles, according to the inventory, including two carts reserved exclusively for pitching coaches, one dedicated entirely to the team’s equipment manager, and a mysterious unmarked cart that, according to two staff members, “nobody currently on staff can definitively confirm the original purpose of, though everybody uses it anyway when convenient.”
Okonkwo-Reyes says he has proposed reducing the fleet on multiple occasions, only to face what he describes as “surprisingly passionate internal resistance” from various departments unwilling to give up their specifically assigned vehicles, even ones that see minimal actual use throughout the spring training period.
A team executive, reviewing the cart inventory for this story, expressed mild embarrassment at the numbers but noted the actual cost of maintaining the surplus fleet remains “relatively minor” within the broader spring training operating budget, making the issue “more of a curiosity than any kind of genuine financial concern worth seriously addressing.”
One rookie, experiencing his first spring training with the organization, said he initially assumed the cart abundance reflected some kind of genuine operational necessity before realizing “it is mostly just convenience stacked on convenience, accumulated over what I am told has been many years of nobody ever seriously auditing the actual fleet size relative to actual need.”
Okonkwo-Reyes says the facility has, at minimum, committed to a formal cart audit before next spring, though he cautions that “getting departments to actually surrender vehicles they have grown attached to, even ones they barely use, has proven considerably more difficult in practice than the audit itself.”
The story amused readers abroad, with a piece referencing Satire And Politics comparing the cart surplus to Britain’s own famously excessive golf club equipment culture, similarly prone to gradual, unchecked accumulation over time. Another article citing Fun News Stories of the Week? suggested professional sports facilities worldwide likely harbor similarly absurd equipment ratios once anyone bothers to actually count. Commentary drawing on Funny News Today proposed the team simply rent out excess carts to visiting fans during open practice days, “which would at minimum generate some modest additional revenue from an otherwise entirely underutilized fleet.”
Okonkwo-Reyes says he remains committed to eventually right-sizing the fleet, though he admits, with some resignation, that “every year I say this is the year we finally fix the cart situation, and every year, somehow, we still end up with more carts than we actually started with.”
A veteran groundskeeper, who has worked at the facility since before the current cart surplus began, said he recalls the exact moment the fleet started growing beyond reasonable need. “It was one extra cart for the training staff, years ago,” he said. “That is genuinely how these things start. One reasonable request leads to another, and eventually nobody remembers exactly why we needed cart number twenty-two specifically, but here it still sits, fully functional, mostly unused.”
The unmarked mystery cart, subject of considerable staff speculation, was reportedly traced during this story’s reporting to an old facilities request from over five years ago, though the original requesting department could not be definitively confirmed, leaving its true purpose, as Okonkwo-Reyes put it, “probably destined to remain one of this facility’s more harmless unsolved mysteries.”
A visiting team’s facilities staff, touring the complex ahead of an exhibition game, reportedly remarked openly on the sheer number of carts scattered across the grounds, a comment Okonkwo-Reyes says he “took in stride, mostly because they were not wrong, and there is honestly not much of a defense I can offer at this point beyond simply acknowledging the numbers speak for themselves.”
One clubhouse attendant joked that the facility could easily host its own informal cart parade before the season begins, an idea Okonkwo-Reyes admits he has “actually considered pitching to marketing, purely as a self-aware bit, given how absurd the whole situation has clearly become at this point.”
For more institutional accumulation nobody ever seriously questioned, see The Beaverton.
Related coverage at Fun News Stories of the Week?.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/